Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!lll-lcc!pyramid!voder!kontron!brad
From: brad@kontron.UUCP (Brad Yearwood)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs
Subject: DAT-based cartridge tapes (1.2GB!) - any thoughts?
Message-ID: <1833@kontron.UUCP>
Date: 24 Mar 88 00:01:12 GMT
Organization: Kontron Electronics, Mt. View, CA
Lines: 38

Somebody who just returned from the CeBIT trade show at Hannover
dropped a tiny tape cartridge on my desk and asked how much it stored.
As the cartridge has about the length and width of a credit card and
the thickness of a slice of diet bread, I took a wild guess and
said 60MB.

Was I ever wrong.  If this tape holds anything, it holds 1.2GB.
It's from Gigatape, located near Munich.  They want about $7K
equivalent for the drive, depending on interface.  A cartridge
is about $28.  (That's an awfully spindly looking little scrap
of tape to be holding 1.2GB!)

Speed claims are 192KBytes/second while streaming, with a full tape
transfer taking about 2 hours.  A fast search is claimed to locate
a block in 20 seconds average.

Such a device is very tempting for overnight backup use.  Of course,
if you lose or damage one of those little tiny tapes, you've lost
a flaming big pile of data.  Just the thing for storing the complete
history of Unix-vs-VMS flame wars.

They claim an error rate of 1E-15 (bits, presumably), but I see
no claims asserted about failure rates over time, or allowed
read passes of a tape once written to maintain that failure rate.
Hmmmm... is that figure for detected or for undetected errors?

The price seems high today, but it is almost certain to
shrink as competition develops and as DAT enters widespread
consumer use.

So my question is, just how far and how long can one trust such a tape?
The tape cartridge and transport are supposedly standard DAT equipment,
with Gigatape's read/write, Reed-Solomon encoder/decoder, and other
control functions.

Brad Yearwood
Kontron Electronics  {voder, pyramid}!kontron!brad
Mountain View, CA